Mascara

Mascara, by Ariel Dorfman, is the story of an unnamed character who is born without a recognizable face. He is effectively invisible: no one ever remembers who he is. All his life he has been obsessed with photography and uses his talent to capture the faces of others, constructing what he calls “an authentic gallery of human privacy – thousands of faces at their worst, their most intolerable.”

Two other characters expand the themes of the novel: a young girl/woman love interest who in opposition to the man with no face is the woman without a past, and a plastic surgeon who can provide his patients with any face they desire.

Ariel Dorfman, who now lives and teaches in the United States, is a Chilean writer and as such has some experience and knowledge of living in an authoritarian state. Mascara, while also being a strange horror story, reflects the difficulties that come out of that authoritarian state: paranoia and human identity. So like many of Dorfman’s works, Mascara is also a commentary on the political atmosphere in Chile and South America.

Dorfman isn’t an easy read—he skips around in time and place so you have to be on your toes—and he doesn’t depend on the standard forms of fiction in his writing, such as dialogue and exposition. Mascara reads like the main character is telling you all about it over a few beers; other works may rely on one-sided telephone calls or extended letters. This is not unique to Dorfman but some readers will find his fiction lacking in the easy clues of the popular novel.

Whereas most of Dorfman’s writing has been in Spanish, Mascara was the first book he wrote in English. Wikipedia provides us with a partial list of the author’s other works:

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